Witnessing

photo from Jonathan Cook’s latest article on the genocide in Palestine, source uncited

As long as I’ve been chronicling the collapse of our global industrial civilization and its systems, I’ve described myself not as an activist — someone determined to “do something about” collapse — but as a witness to this accelerating and uneven disaster.

The word witness comes from an ancient root word that synonymizes three meanings: to see, to say (what is seen), and to understand (what is seen). Hence we also have view, vision, wise, wisdom, idea, story, history, provide, advise, wit and a host of other essential words, all deriving from the same root.

Of course, the three meanings aren’t all inherent in all the words that have sprung from this proto-idea. We can ‘see’ things, both in the sensory and metaphorical sense of the word, without necessarily saying anything, and without necessarily understanding what we’ve seen. Two people can ‘witness’ the same apparent happening, and yet derive completely different views and ideas of what was seen.

This concatenation of meaning has even given rise to two distinct negatives — unwitting (meaning they didn’t understand what it ‘meant’), and witless (meaning they couldn’t understand what it meant, due to cognitive impairment).

I have long argued that we believe what we want to believe — what fits with our existing, conditioned worldview — not necessarily what aligns in any way with the facts or evidence, ie with what we ‘see’. That doesn’t mean that we’re all witless. There are sound evolutionary reasons why human brains are conditioned to find patterns and to disregard what doesn’t fit with those patterns — to dismiss things and not ‘see’ them at all if we can’t ‘make sense’ of them.

Devoutly religious people will see one or more gods’ hands at work in many things that happen, for example, and their belief systems will be untouched by any facts that contradict those interpretations. What we want to believe will affect what we actually believe and hence what we ‘see’ as having actually happened. People with strongly-held beliefs (dogmas and rigid ideologies) will be quick to assert (in testimony, in conversations, in op-eds etc) their own belief about what happened (and why it happened), and will be utterly intolerant of (and deaf to) any other possible interpretation of what was witnessed, and of anyone who says or understands differently.

So the facts about how the US (through “fuck the EU” Victoria Nuland’s 2014 coup, the subsequent CIA-supported civil war etc), with its compliant military sidekick NATO, deliberately and systematically provoked the Russian invasion of the Donbas regions of Ukraine to justify its attempts to destabilize and bring down the Russian government, don’t really matter to most people. And the facts about the ongoing and relentless US-powered genocide in Palestine by Israel really don’t matter to most people. Those facts don’t ‘fit’ with what they believe, so they can’t be right.

Of course, if those currently supporting the Ukraine proxy war and the Palestinian genocide were to witness first-hand what had happened and is happening in either of those countries, then what they saw, what they said, and what they understood, would most likely be very different from what they would be asserting today.

So this raises the question: What exactly does it mean to ‘witness’ something? How can I presume to call myself a witness to the collapse of our entire civilization, when I have not (and probably no one can) ‘witness’ that collapse in its entirety first-hand?

I would argue that it’s because over the past fifty years I have seen mountains of evidence, in the context of the history of past civilizations, that ours is collapsing at an accelerating rate, and that no one and no ‘group’ of people, no matter how large and smart and rich and well-organized, can prevent or even mitigate that collapse. My conditioning (as a nature-lover, and as a student of history and culture and human nature) is such that I must do my best to ‘witness’ this collapse: to see it happening, say what I think is happening, and try to understand why it is happening.

I do not presume to be a ‘witness’ to the ghastly events unfolding in Ukraine or Palestine. But in my writing about these events, I rely substantially on the first-hand accounts of those who have been and continue to witness these events. And their accounts tell a very, very different story from the fourth-hand press releases, propagandized ‘intelligence’ reports, and hate- and war-mongering op-eds in the media.

And perhaps more importantly, my writing attempts to discern not only what is ‘seen’ by others, first-hand, to be happening in those countries, but why it might be happening — not because people are simply ‘evil’ or ‘insane’, but rather as the combatants’ automatic, entrained responses to a lifetime of cultural and biological conditioning, under the ever-worsening circumstances of our pressure-cooker, overcrowded, falling-apart civilization. My job, and our job, I believe, is not to condone or condemn, but simply to understand. (Of course, as someone who has been conditioned to believe we have no free will over what we do and what we believe, I would say that.)

That does not imply that I cannot be outraged, and am not outraged, by what is apparently happening — that’s part of my conditioning too. But while I completely understand the expressions of outrage from those personally affected by these ghastly events, I have absolutely no time for those not personally affected who vent their outrage and righteous indignation, to assuage their own neuroses and uselessly rile up others. Inflicting your hate- and fear-driven mental illness on others is an act of cruelty, and it has no value other than to dangerously and destructively self-perpetuate.

Yet, even when it comes to these hordes of ignorant opinionated spewers of hate and fear, I believe my job is to witness (and understand) their dysfunctional behaviour, too. So-called “social media” seem to have evolved specifically to attract and inflame these sad people, in order to sell them crap they don’t need, and thus they encourage behaviours that will probably make their psychological illnesses even worse. I have met a number of these people, whose uninformed and misinformed, second-hand opinions, “likes”, piling-on, trolling, and emotional outbursts bear all the signs of deep trauma, childhood neglect, social isolation and abuse. It says a great deal about our crumbling civilization that the “social media” cesspool has become, by default, the primary means by which so many people meet their needs for attention, appreciation, and reassurance, needs they can’t fulfil through genuine, coherent, practiced communication with other human beings face-to-face.

This is what happens, I guess, as a civilization enters its final stages of decline. It was inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less tragic. Our means of coping with the increasingly unbearable reality of chaotic collapse seems to entail us, somehow, becoming less human, less capable of authentic human appreciation, empathy, and understanding. Like rats in an overcrowded laboratory cage, fighting over the dregs, increasingly, we can no longer tolerate, no longer witness, and no longer care.

.  .  .  .  .

’Cúagilákv Jess Housty, a citizen of the Haíłzaqv First Nation, recently wrote her own essay on witnessing, based on her years of living alongside the whales of the Pacific coast.

“I’ve learned the greatest threat to life is disconnection”, she writes. The culture of her people is all about relationship, about caring, and about the interconnectedness of all life on earth. She speaks of bearing witness as an act of humility, a precondition to conscious living and acting with humanity:

Like many others, I watched with an ache in my heart in 2018 when Tahlequah, an orca in the Southern Resident J pod, nudged her dead calf to the ocean’s surface for 17 days in what appeared to be a ritual of mourning…

Grief is ceremony. It can have elements that are both private and public, but when it is enacted in a public way as Tahlequah’s was, we can’t be simple spectators. We need to be witnesses.

In Haíłzaqv culture, to be a witness is a deep responsibility. It obligates you to be an archive embodied, ready to recall the events and the ceremonies you have witnessed and the business that has been conducted before you when the record of your testimony is required… In the context of Tahlequah’s mourning, bearing witness is how we must reciprocate the ocean’s generosity, the feasts it has provided us, the gifts it has given us.

I don’t know why Tahlequah’s calf died. I can recite the pressures that bear down on the ocean, on orcas in general, on Tahlequah’s pod in particular. I carry that anxiety in my bones like ocean salt etching into my marrow. Dwindling food sources. Chemical and noise pollution. The lingering intergenerational impacts of all the live captures in decades past. The hazards of shipping oil. The low howl of climate change.

My empathy overwhelms me at times because what I see in our ocean relatives so closely parallels what I see in my own community; we’ve also felt starvation and contamination. We’ve also heard our languages drowned out by white noise and felt the intergenerational trauma of fractured families. We’ve also calculated what we stand to lose to an oil spill and stared down the uncertain future of a wildly shifting climate…

I cannot imagine the deep grief of losing your offspring. If that mourning was an ocean, I’m not sure I could even imagine standing at its shore. But when I watched the footage of her nosing her dead calf to the ocean’s surface, I felt her pain — in my head, my heart, and my womb. And when I watched her pod take turns lifting that calf up so she could rest as she completed her sacred work, Tahlequah reminded me that we do not move through grief and uncertainty alone. We do it with our community, bearing witness. And thus, our community endures.